The Nielsen ratings have long been a stable means to gauge the national market impact of advertising on television. More often than not, web sites use a simple “hits” metric. A “hit” indicates how many times a web page has been accessed, but not by whom. Many web sites also compromise privacy by recording people's Internet data such as their web Internet address, after which the person may receive unsolicited junk mail or advertising (e.g. “spamming”). This data is also used for marketing purposes by other companies, which raises privacy concerns.
The World Wide Web (WWW) is a system of Internet servers that support specially formatted documents, and is a packet based communications network. The documents are formatted in a language called Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). Users access the WWW, for example, via personal computers (PC) or workstations running web browsers. Web browsers are software applications used to locate web pages and allow a user to graphically display pages of a web site or document. Examples of web browsers are Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape's Navigator. In order to connect a web site to the World Wide Web, a user such as a corporation wishing to have an web site, pays a fee to a domain name registration company (such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)) and the domain name registration company assigns an address to the user. This address is guaranteed to be unique. This World Wide Web address is called a Universal Resource Locator (URL). The URL is a global address of documents and other resources on the World Wide Web and defines a path to a data file on the user's computer. The data file is the user's web page. The URL of a web page is paired with a textual name. For example, Lucent's World Wide Web address for the Mount Olive Product Realization Center web page is www.mtt.lucent.com, which corresponds to the numerical value 135.5.146.6.